Effective presentations require coordinated AV systems. In making presentations, speakers generally use projectors to facilitate understanding of the subject matter of the presentation. In the past, presentations were made with simple overhead projectors that projected images of slides onto a larger screen. Overhead projectors merely provided visual aid.
To provide the audio aspect of the presentation, the speaker needed to either speak or coordinate another device, such as a tape recorder, with the overhead projector. With more than one device to control, speakers had difficulty coordinating the AV equipment without the help of another person.
Today, with modern AV equipment, speakers often make presentations using remotely located projectors that allow input from other devices, such as laptop computers and video cassette recorders (VCRs). Modern projectors have made presentations more effective by projecting an image from a computer monitor or television screen onto a much larger screen.
Throughout the disclosure, including in the claims, the expression "audio-visual control panel" (or "AV control panel") is used to denote an apparatus coupled to a remotely located AV projector and one or more input devices (e.g., laptop computers, VCRs, etc.), and configured to control the projector in response to user commands. Typically, each of the projector and the input devices is connected by a cable to the AV control panel, but it is contemplated that one or more of them can alternatively be coupled to the AV control panel by a wireless link. The user commands are typically entered by direct user manipulation of controls on the AV control panel, but it is contemplated that they can alternatively be entered by user manipulation of a remote control device coupled to the AV control panel.
Conventional AV controllers allow users to control remotely located projectors (the projectors are typically mounted in the ceiling), but do not provide an integrated patch point to connect various input devices to a remotely located projector so that a user can connect a sequence of different input devices to the projector during a presentation. Using some conventional AV controllers, a speaker can select a particular input device, switch to a different input device during the same presentation, and also adjust the projector output audio volume (and turn off and on the projector), all without assistance from an AV coordinator.
However, there is a need for a user-friendly AV control panel with integrated patch points having modular design so that it can conveniently and inexpensively be configured by an installer in any of a variety of ways (e.g., for use with different combinations of input devices), for an AV control panel which provides projector power status feedback efficiently to the user, and for an AV control panel which can learn the command set of any of a variety of projector remote control devices (and then control a projector using each learned command set).